The UK's Official Top 40 songs of the summer 2002
20.07.2022 - 17:37
/ officialcharts.com
The sun is shining right now on what's proving to the hottest summer in the UK's history books, so we at Official Charts thought it was time to take things back to a slightly cooler time, and revisit the biggest songs in the UK over the summer of 2002.
And the biggest song of the summer two decades ago is eerily prescient, as we've just seen the release of a brand-new Elvis Presley biopic starring Austin Butler as the King of Rock'n'Roll, with a performance that is already starting to attract awards buzz.
And indeed, Elvis proved to be as popular in 2002 as he does in 2022; A Little Less Conversation, a hyped-up, funky remix of Elvis' 1968 hit was by and far the biggest on the UK charts at that moment in time. Containing remixed vocals from Elvis and produced by JXL (now known as Junkie XL), A Little Less Conversation was Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart for a total of four weeks.
Between the first week of June and the last week of August 2002, A Little Less Conversation logged an impressive 628,000 UK sales; more than any other song at that point in the year. Today, the track's total UK chart units stand at 1.2 million.
The UK's second-best selling summer single of 2002 was the (better than you actually remember) debut post-Pop Idol single of Gareth Gates, Anyone Of Us (A Stupid Mistake), whose narrative - Gareth begging a signification other to forgive his wandering eye - you sense would be less well-received in the modern day. The second of three consecutive Number 1 singles for Gareth, it clocked up a hearty 543,000 sales during the summer of 2002.
In third place we have German happy hardcore anarchists Scooter with The Logical Song, which originally peaked at Number 2 on the Official Singles Chart.
2002 was